I love this game!

I played wow for 6 years, but found both the bgs and the raids meh in cata... had 10 85's really liked the game.
Tried many other games, EQ2, D&D online, Aion, LOTR, Eve, Lol, Warhammer, AoC, etc.

But when I played Rift it felt like the first time I played wow, totally addictive, mind racing, f'n cool!
It's not like current wow, but more like Burning Crusade, which suits me just fine - that was the best time I had in wow..... nostalgia......

Got a max level shammy/druid/justicar cleric, and a mid level necro lock.
I gotta say that library up north in the snow has more intricacy in the model then all of Org and SW put together. Awesome stuff!

Looking for to SWTOR and GW2 of course, like everyone else, but I sure hope Rift survives.
Seems like a mature game, with most players out of their tweens... as compared to.... well.... it's nice....

But when I played Rift it felt like the first time I played wow, totally addictive, mind racing, f'n cool!

Has largely summed up me and my best friend's Rift experience so far, we're just leveling and it already seems amazing, the AA system (Planar Attunement) is freaking sweet. I'm level 48 and can't wait to be 50!

I got in on BC on the tail end and missed all the good stuff that came with it. What makes it more like BC then WotLK? The mark system for raid gear is sort of like wrath was. Although Trion has done more EQ2 things compared to WoW things.

Also for those wondering go check out the free version of EQ2 and log in and just run around and look at the menu. The gfx are bad in that free version, but the gameplay in Rift is like they took EQ2 and properly combined it with WoW with some LOTR mixed in.

What makes it more like BC then WotLK? The mark system for raid gear is sort of like wrath was.

Main thing is linearity and available goals to set, goals that in turn makes you want to spend time in game achieving them through various activities. Vanilla and BC had a linear raid path where you had to do A to do B and so on, while Rift isn't fully linear, it has a similar structure where the top end reward can only be achieved through the hardest challenge currently in game, the rewards below still has validity as you need them to get to that end goal and the further down the scale of reward the more ways to get it.

Grinds is another thing that Rift has that isn't really a part of WoW any more, a lot of people claim grinds to be bad gives them the feeling of it being work, they are mostly optional and provides a healthy amount of content for those that wish to pursue the rewards from them though.

The marks differ mainly in that Blizzards way gives you the top end reward or equivalent for just doing daily dungeon at a rate of 0.6 piece per weeks or so would be my guess, this combined with tier resets making previous rewards obsolete for every content patch. Trying to farm the latest gear in Rift the same way would take you ages but instead the previous tiers rewards are not made obsolete but instead required to move along the progression path.

ahh ok got you. Yeah we are on Raid tier 2 and the only way to get that gear is to do the content. In 1.6 they are adding raid 1.5 gear and greater marks in Rise of the Phoenix. I am really liking how they are handling gating mechanisms to get people into the current content while trying to keep old content viable.